Whenever you do a post on light rail systems, you end up getting comments from light rail junkies who's obsession with choo choos rival my three year old nephew's obsession with Thomas the Tank Engine.

My post earlier today was no different.

Unfortunately, the truth will set you free Choo Choo freak. Let's talk about the Tampa rails system completed in 2002........

Proud officials here have coined a word - "transportainment" - to describe the vintage electric streetcars that for the past seven years have run along a route lined by restaurants, shops, nightspots, public arenas and tourist attractions.

On one recent weekday, however, scant evidence of either root word in that description could be found.

Around noon, a succession of largely empty streetcars rolled by at 20-minute intervals - five passengers on the first two, four on the next and a solitary rider aboard the one after that.

So much for the transportation. As for the entertainment, that seemed largely confined to drivers wearing classic conductor hats and occasionally tooting the horn.

Here's a video showing their rail system. Pay attention to the details.

If you watched the whole video you would have noticed a few items.

1) Notice the cars whizzing by. Obviously, it's not faster than traditional transportation modes.2) Notice the lack of development along the street. It's looks like a series of 1950's industrial parks.3) Notice the lack of passengers at the stations. Isn't moving people the whole purpose of these things?

Look, I think it would be nice to have a little choo choo to ride around the city on, oh, say three times in my life. But is that a wise investment of hundreds of millions of dollars when we have a bridge ready to fall into the river if it isn't rebuilt in the next decade?

I don't think so.

But I still love it when the pro rail guys comment. It's like watching Rainman" all over again.

First off, it’s worth looking at whether the poster is racist. Liberals seem pretty certain it is. An LA Weekly blogger commented that “the only thing missing is a noose.” Now, you might be scratching your head and saying that the only people who would call this racist are brain-dead liberals who shriek “racism!” at every criticism about Obama as an alternative to thinking and only cause more problems by confusing the issue of racism and should thus be chased out of society and forced to live in the sewers, only emerging at night to feed on garbage and bugs.

And while that’s quite fair and probably true, we should still give the possibility of racism a fair hearing. Don’t you remember the long, racist history of black people being compared to the Joker? Of course not, because I just made that up — but it could be true in some alternate universe. Also, the image involves white makeup on a black person. White on black — that has to be racist somehow. I’ll bet makeup places won’t even sell white pancake makeup to black people. They’d be like “No! Get out of here, black person! We won’t sell that to you! That’s racist!”

Beyond the racism in the image that’s quite obvious to crazy people, the other question is whether there are any real substantive comparisons between Obama and the Joker. On the surface, they don’t seem at all alike. The Joker is psychotic, and I’ve heard Obama called a lot of things — arrogant, incompetent, deceitful, a Communist — but not psychotic. Obama doesn’t seem like he’s out to kill anyone — not even terrorists — and only leaves the option of killing people on the table to help make ends meet in his health care plan.

Also, the Joker seemed chaotic but was very careful in his planning, while the chaos from the Obama administration seems much more explainable by pure incompetence.

A powerful House Democrat who has turned down a Republican's call to subpoena records of a mortgage program at Countrywide Financial Corp. received two home loans from the lender.

Some information in the lawmaker's mortgage documents raises the possibility they were made through the program, which provided loans to public figures and other favored borrowers often at lower interest rates or with lower origination fees than were available to the general public.

The loans were made to Rep. Edolphus Towns of New York, who heads the House Oversight and Government Reform committee. The panel's ranking Republican, California Rep. Darrell Issa, has been pushing to have the committee subpoena mortgage records showing who received loans through Countrywide's VIP program -- operated under former Chief Executive Angelo Mozilo and known within the company as "Friends of Angelo."

From the city of Akron who hasn't had a conservative run the city since the it was covered by a glacier...........

Akron police and Mayor Don Plusquellic are hurling accusations at each other after they tangled outside a downtown nightclub early Sunday.

The union charged Monday that the mayor was slurring his words, was abusive to officers and interfered with an investigation of a large fight that Plusquellic had witnessed after he had been out drinking.

Meanwhile, Plusquellic said he was upset that he was placed on hold twice when calling 911, a responding officer was arrogant and disrespectful, and police failed to pursue vital witnesses.

The mayor — who admitted he pestered police at the scene to interview witnesses — called the union's version a ''cock and bull story.''

''What I did was vitally important to cracking this case,'' he said Monday night in a telephone interview.

Plusquellic and others called 911 around 2:30 a.m. Sunday to report a fight involving many people that had spilled outside the Lux Nightclub near West Exchange and South Main streets.

First, what in the hell is a mayor doing at a "club" at 2:30 in the morning? Was he out fighting crime? I'll bet he was nice and sober.

Second, Plusquellic is white, are we to assume that cops were rude to a white guy? From the Gates incident, it became clear that cops only treat black guys rudely. I don't think so.

Third, let's do this again class. Cops don't show up on the scene to listen to some drunken a-hole tell them how to do their job. When cops show up their first priority is to secure the scene. Having some douchebag tell them how to do their job does not enhance that effort. You'd think this mayor would know that. But then again, he's a middle aged hack trying to get his freak on with some young honey at a club.

Apparently, the LA Fitness gunman was upset because he couldn't find a babe......

His 4,610-word Web diary appeared to be a nine-month chronology of his plans to end his misery with a shocking act of carnage at his gym. He couldn't understand why women ignored him, despite his best efforts to look nice. He hadn't had a girlfriend since 1984, hadn't slept with a woman in 19 years.

"Women just don't like me. There are 30 million desirable women in the US (my estimate) and I cannot find one. Not one of them finds me attractive," the 48-year-old computer programmer lamented.

Here's a little tip for the rest of you potential sexually frustrated gunman. Women can pick up on that whole homicidal maniac vibe you give off and, even though it's been a while since I checked out a Playboy, I don't remember any centerfolds naming that as a "turn on".

Maybe you ought to seek professional help before you get into the dating world.

Obama makes that cliche sound so simple, so appealing but that's usually not real life.

Let's put this challenge to a more real life example.

Let's say that there's a cancer patient and the traditional treatment for a procedure is a generic red pill that costs $5.00 a dose. Because of the uniqueness of symptoms, red pill treatment may not work on Patient A. But a new, blue pill, is out on the market to address those symptoms.

Unfortunately, the new, blue pill costs $500 a dose.

Which one would Dr. Obama prescribe?

Well, if Dr. Obama operates like the State of Oregon's health care provider, he'd prescribe the purple pill for assisted suicide. Here's a real life example of government health care making the choice for the patient.....

The powerful story of Barbara Wagner demonstrates why this discussion is of utmost importance. When Barbara’s lung cancer reappeared during the spring of 2008 her oncologist recommended aggressive treatment with Tarceva, a new chemotherapy. However, Oregon’s state run health plan denied the potentially life altering drug because they did not feel it was "cost-effective." Instead, the State plan offered to pay for either hospice care or physician-assisted suicide.

From the Queen City of Cincinnati, who hasn't had a conservative run the city since Pete Best was a Beattle............

Cincinnati police could take the biggest hit in layoffs this year to make up for the city’s $28 million deficit.

City Manager Milton Dohoney proposes to lay off 138 members of the police department, but he said the number of officers assigned to neighborhood patrols will not change, and neither will the numbers assigned to each of the five districts.

That would leave civilians in the department, of which there are about 140, and officers assigned to investigative and other jobs. Chief Tom Streicher will speak later this afternoon about what the cuts will mean.The 138 police employees are part of 319 position cuts throughout the city. Of those 319, 295 are positions now filled -- 208 of them tull-time, 87 part-time. Exact positions have not yet been disclosed. The city employs about 6,000.

So the city decides to send out a big 'ole welcome call to criminals in the area that it's hunting season.

This on the heals of the city spending 3.5 million on new recycling bins for the residents.

If you live in the city and don't have your concealed carry permit, you are insane.

Excellent piece in Reason Magazine on who gets subsidized and who gets screwed in the nightmare aka "Cash for Clunkers"............

As for the factual claims, did cash-for-clunkers indeed "help everyone"? Well, no. Let's take my favorite example: me. The Welch household owns one car, a 1994 Acura Integra. While clunky, this 15-year-old car does not qualify for the program, because it gets too many miles per gallon–around 28, allegedly. So our tax dollars are being redistributed to people who have made less eco-friendly purchases than we have.

One could counter-argue that monocle-wearing magazine editors such as moi are not the intended audience for this bit of alleged FDRism, and while that actually doesn't make any sense (since no one's checking your pay stubs on the showroom floor), let's roll with it anyway. Here's the problem even then: We bought that pup (for the C-4-Cish price of $4,000, about six years ago), back when we were poor. Hell, I'd bet that the majority of households whose lone car is a 1994 anything ain't exactly swimming in the do-rey-mi. What this program does is take money from the stickshift-driving non-rich, and gives it to anyone with an SUV and/or old beater. Who (again, unlike us) is ready to shell out five figures for a shiny new car.

And wait! It gets worse, from that whole social-justice angle. What about the estimated 12 percent of Americans aged 15 years and above who don't drive, period? What about all the adults who live in the 8 percent of households that don't have a vehicle? What about half the residents of Manhattan, who took transit planners' decades-old dream to heart and "got out of their cars"? What about those who are too poor to drive? The answer: All of these people are subsidizing whoever turns in an SUV or crappy old $800 K-Car like the one I used to drive. Not only that, but what do you think happens to the $800 car market when the guvmint is handing out $4,500 checks to have the things destroyed? I'll go ahead and state the obvious: It shrinks, making it more expensive for the truly poor people, the ones who want to make that daring leap from the bus system to an awful old bucket of rust.

Tuesday, August 04, 2009

Apparently, out here in "Redville" we have a lot of "slow" children since you see these signs on every block in every subdivision.

It brings to me to these questions.

1) Are these kids slow mentally or just not too fleet a foot? You can't really tell from the sign. The figure looks more like a power walker.

2) I thought in the day of mainstreaming we weren't supposed to identify children as "slow".

3) If/when you see one of these "slow" children are you supposed to point at them or not make eye contact? Are you allowed to feed them?

4) Where the hell are the "quick" kids in these neighborhoods and why aren't we identifying them with one of those "my kid is an honor roll student at Pisgah Junior High" bumper stickers?

5) It seems to me that most of these slow kids are going to be democrats some day so why aren't their families moving back to the city where they'll be right at home with the slow members of, say, the Detroit city council.

Over two hundred years ago, America's founding fathers established a constitutional republic based on the audacious notion that the interests of its citizens would be best served by a wise body of their democratically-elected representatives. In the two centuries that have since transpired, that bold experiment has largely been a success. But we should also realize our system only works when the interests of voters and their government are in harmony. Unfortunately, recent evidence suggests that America's hard-working hometown legislators are feeling the pinch from a fickle and increasingly out-of-touch voter class who no longer serves our needs.

Nowhere has this disturbing trend been more evident than in the recent debate over health care reform. Like hundreds of our fellow legislators and government officials, we recently traveled to a town hall meeting to distribute a grassroots press release explaining why this critical legislation is a done deal. Our advance staffs said that should anticipate a respectful, positive hearing from local media and bused-in union members. Instead we were greeted by a rude howling mob of idiot "voters" who refused to listen to reason, and ruined what should have been a killer photo op for our re-election ad campaign.

Have these arrogant ivory tower armchair quarterbacks ever had to live with the pressures of being a working stiff Senator or Cabinet Secretary in Washington DC? Have they ever had to juggle markup language on a supplemental appropriations bill, or deal with an incompetent Chief of Staff who constantly double-books fund raising dinners? Apparently not, if their whiny obnoxious chants are any indication. "Read the Bill! Read the Bill!" blah, blah, blah, as if we weren't already exhausted from writing and voting for the damned thing.

About ten years ago, I got involved with a talking head, ding dong who lived in New York (call it a rebound, midlife crisis relationship).

I always found it hilarious that this woman was taking an anti-depressant (Wellbutrin) yet found a way to continue her consumption of vodka gimlets. Some times, she would actually down her meds with the vodka.

When I asked her if she ever considered dropping the booze to help her "depression" issues, she looked at me like I had three heads (maybe that was the vodka). It never occurred to her that her lifestyle (diet, exercise, alcohol consumption) might actually be a contributor to her depression issues.

Last week, I went to the eye doctor and he told me I needed to see my GP because my blood pressure was really high. Now, for the record, old Gordon thinks the food pyramid consists of beer, pizza, donuts, nachos and ice cream; none of which help a blood pressure issue. So before I could go in the see my GP, I radically changed my diet and really started watching the crap I fuel my body with. Within a week and a half, my blood pressure is down about 20 points. Accomplished without aid of a script.

Now for me, I will resist till the day I die having to take a daily med for some condition. In addition, I have a high deductible insurance with an HSA account so any med is coming right out of my pocket. So I also have a financial interest in not taking meds.

But it has me wonder; how much of our medical costs are wrapped up in taking meds for conditions that could be solved by simple lifestyle changes?

How much of our medical costs are wrapped up in treating conditions resulting from lifestyle choices (diabetes, blood pressure, heart disease, etc.) that people continue even after diagnoses? My guess is we could collectively save billions if people were forced to pay for these scripts out of pocket. They might decide the lifestyle change is cheaper.

There were lots of reasons to vote against Obamamania without even including this drivel.

But when I'm going through and seeing liberals post on the "technical" violation of the Constitution, it has me wonder what the hell is up with this........

Here's one article.......

But whatever the actual percentage was of kooky Democratic "truthers," they never got even close to the mainstream cred now enjoyed by the largely Republican "birthers." You didn't find serious lefty pundits or elected Democrats muttering that there were still serious questions about whether Bush was in on the 9/11 plot, or ducking the issue when reporters came to call.

Even still, at least the Democratic wingnuts were obsessing over a gravely serious matter -- treason and the deaths of thousands of innocents. The Republican wingnuts are obsessing over what is, at worst, a highly technical violation of one of the ugliest and outmoded passages in our Constitution.

Resignation, impeachment, or nothing. If Obama stood his ground, and Congress stood by him, then the only way to legally remove him from office would be for someone to sue. Problem is, no one would have standing to bring such a lawsuit. To establish standing, a plaintiff must show that he has suffered an injury personal to him, that the defendant caused the injury, and that the court could provide a remedy. That turns out to be an impossible task.

So these are now the democratic talking points? We've gone from "is he really an American" to splitting hairs on technical aspects of the law as to whether he's eligible to serve. It's almost like they're conceding a breach in the dike and now they're moving behind the next one to shore it up.

From the Queen city of Cincinnati, who hasn't had a republican mayor since the earth was flat (as reported by Al Gore's movie "An Inconvenient Truth").............

Cincinnati, your city leaders really want you to recycle a lot more – so much so that they’ll spend more than $3.5 million to lease 64-gallon, wheeled recycling carts as the city struggles to cope with a $28 million deficit.

A majority of council members voted Monday to approve a 10-year lease.

That might seem like bad timing, but proponents say the carts and other recycling expansion plans – including participation incentives – will make the recycling program more effective. The plan should save the city money long term, they say, in less cost at the landfill and reduced expenses for trash pickup. Next year, four fewer trash trucks could be needed, saving more than $950,000.

Monday, August 03, 2009

Even the NY Times is starting to catch on to the notion that blue state politics don't work out quite so well in bad times...............

And, inevitably, the tendency toward political corruption. The Republicans have their mistresses, but the Democrats are dealing with a more serious array of scandals: the Blagojevich-Burris embarrassment in Illinois, Senator Christopher Dodd’s dubious mortgage dealings in Connecticut, the expansive graft case in New Jersey, and a slew of corruption investigations featuring Democratic congressmen.

This helps explain why the Republican Party might be competitive in the Northeast for the first time in years. Chris Christie is easily leading Jon Corzine in the race for New Jersey’s governorship. Rob Simmons might unseat Chris Dodd in Connecticut. Rudy Giuliani, who has experience with blue-state crises, is pondering a run for the statehouse in New York.

And it also helps explain Obama’s current difficulties. The president is pushing a California-style climate-change bill at a time when businesses (and people) are fleeing the Golden State in droves. He’s pushing a health care plan that looks a lot like the system currently hemorrhaging money in Massachusetts. His ballooning deficits resemble the shortfalls paralyzing state capitals from Springfield to Sacramento.

“Never let a serious crisis go to waste,” Rahm Emanuel remarked last fall. But in a crisis, all the public tends to care about are jobs and economic growth. It’s not the ideal time to pass costly social legislation that promises to reap dividends only in the long term, if at all.

That’s why Franklin Roosevelt waited until 1935, when the Great Depression seemed to be waning, to push Social Security through Congress. It’s why Lyndon Johnson established Medicare at the peak of the long post-World War II expansion. And it’s why Massachusetts’s health care plan and California’s cap on greenhouse-gas emissions both passed at the height of the recent boom, rather than the bottom.

Obama is still broadly popular, and the public is still broadly sympathetic to his administration’s agenda. But the money has to come from somewhere. You can’t have a bold new liberal era without the growth to pay for it.

The president wants to govern America like a blue state. But for that to work, he’ll need the nation’s economy to start performing more like Texas.

If you've followed this blog for more than a week, you are familiar with my "Life in 'Progress' City" series.

Just to be fair; let it be known that life in "Redville" isn't perfect. While we lack for murders, home invasions, horrible schools, unemployment, high taxes, condemned houses, we do have our share of meth dealers.

Case in point, meet Joseph Wiggins.

A Deerfield Township man, who was the focus of Warren County's first meth lab bust in 2000, will now go to prison for 16 years after getting caught doing the same thing in March.

A jury convicted Joseph Wiggins, 44, of 17 charges involving the raid on his rented Davis Road property, where police found 17 guns, a meth lab in a shed, and a variety of other drugs -- incuding marijuana and prescription drugs -- they say he was selling.

In Warren County Common Pleas Court today, Wiggins told Judge Neal Bronson he was trying to give up drugs after becoming a first-time father last year.

Wiggins was holding the 8-month-old girl when county drug agents bought meth from him and arrested him, Warren County Assistant Prosecutor Derek Faulkner said.

Separately, in Tel Aviv, the police continued hunting for a gunman who fled a gay community center after killing 2 Israelis and wounding at least 10 others on Saturday night. The shock over the attack jolted a society that largely values tolerance and has hardly been exposed to the specter of hate crimes. Both Mr. Netanyahu and the defense minister, Ehud Barak, strongly condemned the attack.

So the Obamunists are getting that they can't blame Bush for things as they are now. So they're doing the next best thing.

Blame Bush & Clinton for Obama being incompetent............

Politicians, like generals, suffer from a tendency to fight the last war. Having studied meticulously the mistakes of their predecessors, they take care to avoid repeating them—and make the opposite ones. They fortify Maginot lines. They overcompensate for past errors. They swing too far in the other direction.

It is difficult to think of a contemporary president who has not fallen prey to this temptation. Jimmy Carter reacted against Richard Nixon's ruthlessness and Lyndon B. Johnson's horse-trading by becoming both too nice and too disdainful of congressional politics. Carter's micromanagement encouraged Ronald Reagan's propensity for detachment. Bill Clinton came to Washington intent on reversing George H.W. Bush's excessive focus on foreign policy—and proceeded to neglect foreign policy for his first few years. George W. Bush compensated for his father's lack of vision and Clinton's indiscipline with his own excesses of grandiosity and punctuality. First ladies do it: Hillary Clinton tried to be the anti-Barbara Bush, while Laura Bush tried to be the anti-Hillary. Even vice presidents do it: Blathering, peripheral Joe Biden is the excessive response to the silent, all-powerful Dick Cheney.

Barack Obama, too, seems to be caught in this dialectical rut. His early difficulties with health care reform, which will probably be the defining domestic initiative of his presidency, are the consequence of over-learning Clinton's lessons. Of course, Clinton's mistakes were fateful and ought not to be repeated. Bill and Hillary were far too controlling of the details of policy and not skillful enough at forging political consensus. They drafted an indigestible, 1,342-page bill in secret and then dumped it on Congress' doorstep. They tried to pass a massive social and economic transformation on a too narrow partisan basis. Rather than compromise, Clinton waved his veto pen. He challenged too many interest groups too directly and lost the propaganda war.

The average high temperature for the month of July was 78.7 degrees versus an average high temperature of 86.4. A difference of 7.7 degrees cooler than normal.

The average low temperature for the month was 61.6 degrees v. an average low of 66.1 a difference of 4.5 degrees cooler than normal.

That brings the score to

Warm 8Cool 6

Some interesting facts about the month of July. Not one day did the temperature exceed 85 degrees.

More than half the days (16) the temperature never exceeded 80 degrees.

As I seem to have to point out for the Branch Gorevidians, I would call this a weather anomaly. But if you are a believer in the religion known as Global Warming, how do you explain such low temperatures. After all it is supposed to be WARMING. Right?

I guess without the warming, the temperature average temperature would have been 76 degrees this month.